Saajid Badat

Saajid Badat (28 March 1979-) was a British al-Qaeda member who, along with Richard Reid, was sent to destroy flights from Europe to the United States. However, Badat did not board his plane, and he was given only 13 years in prison (if he had attempted to blow up the plane, he would have been given a life sentence).

Biography
Saajid Badat was born on 28 March 1979 in Gloucester, England to a couple of Muslim Indians from Malawi who had immigrated to the United Kingdom in the 1970s. Badat's father worked at a Wall's ice cream factory, and Saajid was mature and committed during school, graduating with four A-levels in 1997. He was a devout Muslim, memorizing the whole Quran at age twelve, and he gave up his hopes of being an eye doctor so that he could be an Islamic scholar and teacher. He began to study at an Islamic college in Lancashire, but in 1999 he headed to a madrassa in Pakistan, and he was radicalized by al-Qaeda sympathizers.

Shoe bomb plot
Badat trained at an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, where he met Richard Reid, and the two of them were sent on a mission to blow up flights from Paris to the United States with shoe bombs by Mohammed Atef. Badat met his handler, Tunisian soccer player and al-Qaeda member Nizar Trabelsi, and on 12 September 2001 he obtained a duplicate of his passport at the British embassy in Brussels, Belgium. In December 2001, Badat headed to Manchester to board a plane to Miami, but he told his handler that he would have to tell Reid that he was on his own, deciding not to board the plane. He returned to his Islamic studies in Blackburn, Lancashire quietly, although he kept the shoe bomb parts at his parent's house. In November 2003, the police searched the house, and Badat was arrested. On 28 February 2005, he pled guilty to conspiracy, and he was sentenced to 13 years in prison, with his term being short because he turned away from crime at the last second. He later gave information on would-be New York Subway attacker Najibullah Zazi, leading to his herm being reduced to eleven years, and in March 2010 he was released and prepared for reintegration into society.